Lit Bits-11/19/2014 Gibbons Ruark

Aleathia says:

I found this lovely poem by a writer named Gibbons Ruark.

Gibbons Ruark is a contemporary American poet born in 1941 in the great state of North Carolina. He grew up there and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and shortly thereafter moved to Massachusetts where he worked as a bus boy until earning another degree from University of Massachusetts.  His poems began publishing in the 1960's and was hired on at the University of Delaware in 1968 where he became friends with the writer James Wright.  Ruark has traveled many times to Ireland and maintains a love affair with that country which shows itself in his work.  In his lifetime he has had 8 collections of poetry published with the most recent one being in 2008.


A Vacant Lot

One night where there is nothing now but air
I paused with one hand on the banister
And listened to a film aficionado's
Careless laughter sentence poetry to death.

It's twenty gone years and a few poems later,
The house demolished, the film man vanished,
The friend who introduced us to him dead.

I side with one old master who loves to tell
His film buff friends that film is like an art form,
And yet my eyes keep panning the empty air
Above the rubble, as if, if I could run

The film back far enough, I might still start
For home down the darkened street from the newsstand
And turn a corner to the house still standing,

A faint light showing in an upstairs window.
Is someone reading late? Or is is the night
Our newborn lies burning up with fever,
And all the doctor can say is plunge her

In cold water, wrap her up and hold her,
Hold her, strip her down and plunge her in again
Until it breaks and she is weak but cooling?

Is it the night they call about my father
And I lay the mismatched funeral suit
In the back seat with the cigarettes and whiskey
And drive off knowing nothing but Death and South?

Somewhere a tree limb scrapes at a gutter
The wind blows.  Late trucks rattle the windows.
Never you mind, I say out loud to the girls

Away at school, there's nothing there to hurt you.
The sky is thickening over a vacant lot,
And when I leave there is a hard rain drumming
With the sound of someone up in the small hours,

Thirsty, his palm still warm from a sick child's
Forehead, running the spigot in the kitchen
Full force till the water's cold enough to drink.